Automatic Assassin

by Marc Horne

  Chapter 14

  You see, all had not always been peaceful and sexually satisfying for the mega rich. There’s always one privileged guy who wants to spoil it for everyone. Going all the way back to Siddhartha - who was peaceful, at least - there’s a rich guy who is just waiting for the chance to mess everything up. Sometimes he is just not rich enough and wants to get a bigger slice. Other times he is plenty rich and seeks something else, some überhobby like universal peace. You’ll hear different characterizations of where Count Feliz Boa Morte fit in.

  There was always something a bit suspect about the Boa Mortes. They never made their own planet. Oh no. Instead they had to ‘conquer’ a planet that someone else had messed up, either by mismanaging their terraforming Titans or by unleashing ill-considered GMOs to breed there. If a Boa Morte found an ocean planet full of sea dragons, that was like their birthday. A young countess or count would be sent down on a quest, armed only with a steed or a bark and what they could carry. They would tame that planet. But not too much. They would leave enough hyperfauna that they could never just cruise around in peace. If you asked them they would call it respect for the planet. In actuality it was more like keeping just enough beasts around that they didn’t get too bored.

  There was always one tall blonde female Boa Morte throwing a spear through something. There was also always a painter at hand to capture her grandeur, it seemed.

  Although his mother was once such big blonde, brown skinned woman, Count Feliz Boa Morte was thin and pale skinned with black hair that he grew in the womb and never lost. But he killed serpents too, and sailed around planets using just stars, winds and wits. And he could sing a song that would have them all weeping on the decks about the long journey from Earth, and the holes in space and the loss of what it meant to be alive.

  But he didn’t just sing those songs and get drunk and go and screw below the decks. He stayed on the deck and thought about the unnatural plague of weakened humanity, soft fantasy pleasure slugs making planets all cushy. He knew that he might be one of the only young men with muscular arms who looked a thing in the eye when he killed it. And he knew that even his own virile and honorable life sat on a pyramid of chained up data slaves. He wanted to bring it all down.

  He walked through a marble palace where his uncle was watching TV, the most data rich transaction Feliz and his family ever exposed themselves to. It was a sequence of a plant growing somewhere and a blue bee spiraling into its trumpet. Feliz stopped and looked over his uncle’s shoulder. This was the uncle who had broken tusks off the boars of Hyperia.

  “What’s up, uncle?”

  “Nothing much, young Feliz. Resting. Watching a flower.”

  “We have real flowers here.”

  “Don’t like flowers much.”

  “Why do we watch TV, uncle?”

  “Us Boa Mortes?”

  “Our whole caste. We won’t use the internet, because that is beneath us, but we watch TV. We won’t have robots, but we’ll have slaves.”

  “Your question just got too complicated, buddy. Take a breath.”

  “There is something going on,” he said.

  Then he had a thought-flash that he couldn’t quite figure out. It was like, He had no idea what that meant. There was a troubling alien thought in his head. Like a tumor or a slug or something.

  “Uncle…what is it for? The space empire. Why did we leave Earth? Why do we still have poor people?”

  “What the fuck? Fuck off!”

  SO BEGAN THE REVOLUTION!

  Boa Morte contacted young princes and princesses across family lines. His appeal was simple “Bring down the families, unify the human race, let’s all enjoy the treasure of space together.”

  Soon there was a fleet of two-hundred fast, dangerous ships following the Boa Morte Revolution. They tore along the spacelanes and came out on any exposed artificial pleasure planet and demanded that its inhabitants join their quest. The inhabitants always just agreed because they were terrified of these space pirates and because they had nothing to do. After they agreed they read the small print: no more slaves, no more using people’s brains as computers, equality, no more genocide farming of any kind.

  What were you going to do at that point? You were already in space with a uniform and a sword.

  The revolution continued.

  Battered by the uprising, several space potentates met via tactile holograms. Even that was disgusting to some of them but they had to show they were serious. The hologram hands shook. Cheeks were kissed. Holospittle was left behind. It seemed the grossest potentates had the most HD holograms.

  Meseret was there, big, black and beautiful. Old Haja was there, tiger-striped tattoo skin, fat and foul. Wales was there, red and mad. Zheng was there, with her braid trailing on the floor. And of course Boa Morte Sr. (as they now called him – he had been overshadowed by his son) was there. His coffee colored hands twitched unbecomingly: it was clear he was heavily medicated.

  Old Haja spoke first. “Kill them. All of them. Daughters, sons, whatever. Send a thousand ships. Bend black holes and suck them up. Leave no one alive. Why are we even having this discussion? I have three-hundred ships to send you.”

  Meseret spoke next. “Remind me to never walk by your side in a jungle. Are we sure this is what it seems? Of all the brainless aristocrats in the universe, we are supposed to believe that a Boa Morte has decided to advance the human race? Can muscle cells think, suddenly? This is the most obvious trap I’ve ever seen. Which of you is playing the puppet with poor Boa Morte here? You’ll burn if you come near my planets or try and touch the Earth. I’ll speak no more, but I’ll sit back and just watch you play yourselves.” [She indeed did.]

  They talked some more. They came up with a plan. First kill young Feliz Boa Morte. Assassination style. Then bring their children home. Then basically lobotomize them. More TV, more money. No more decision-making. Decision making would be distributed among a trusted cadre that would be in layers and the lower layers would be fully in the headnet and could be spied on well. But big decisions had to be made only by the families, the hereditary core. No one was willing to give that up. That’s when the whole ‘select a piece of fruit’ system was born. Maybe their children would never know the procedure behind the fruit and never know the meaning and actions encoded by their trusted counselors in their choice of meal. But it was their children that were choosing the fruit and running the worlds, not some damned machines. Fuck robots!

  They found out the hard way that Boa Mortes are tricky to kill. Boa Morte led them on chases that terminated in the immense surprise of solar flares. His men floated through space in little bubbles and then were suddenly upon them in their silver ships, killing their dudes.

  He loved to gatecrash meetings about him, put a bullet in someone’s head and then slam the mic on the ground.

  It was all falling apart. Space was on the verge of becoming just space again. It had been made into a big fat cushion for rich people, but now this ungrateful bastard was pissing all over it.

  Of course the potentates started to in-fight too. Some of them were disintegrated from space, even. From the dust clouds they called the Titans - their planet-making machines - and got a hair’s breadth away from unleashing them on each others worlds to scar and crack them. The huge biological planet-making machines, those vast colonies of plasma beings, the only other living thing in the universe, the things that they probably should have called God: they nearly called them out of their heaven to kill each other. They nearly gave a taste of human blood to them. Truly these were desperate times.

  The galaxy was on fire. Blackwarps were crumbling. Back on earth, data farmers started to get messages exhorting them to tear off their eyephones. The starfleet of Boa Morte danced through space where others chugged like trains and they ripped enemies apart like piranhas on cattle.

  Then it was over.

  Very quickly. And with no fanfare, of course. Things went back to normal, except the aforementioned f
ruit-based decision system was implemented. Boa Morte was gone. His data was wiped as best as it could be, although traces of him echoed around the nets. He had been a hologram printed on everything for a while and gobbets of his spirit popped up from time to time in the system.

  He was not defeated. The potentates were as confused as anybody by what happened. And when their children came home to be brainwashed back to happier times the children didn’t know either. All that was known was that Boa Morte and his closest guard headed off on a secret mission and did not come back.

  Years passed. At first every day without him was defined by that fact. But soon all the days were days without him. He was as good as dead. He was lost in space. Better than dead.

  So the discovery that the man beneath the artificial Xolo personality was none other than Count Feliz Boa Morte was terrible, terrible news and thoroughly justified the entirely illegal and inflammatory invasion of Earth to bring back his body.

  Magrega and Dubloon were taking the gamble of their lives, but they were tired of life serving the most idiotic son of the Old Haja. With this move they would either sign their death certificate, or vault to the highest ranks of galactic power.

  And the coconut had been split: the blitzkrieg was begun.